Nights at the Circus (29 page)

As the band started in on ‘The March of the Gladiators’, the Colonel’s heart filled with a kind of holy awe, to have provided for such an illustrious gathering so rich a banquet of astonishment, and to have coined so much profit from it. He felt himself both to be glorified and also the entrepreneur of glory; above his scrubby head floated an invisible halo composed of dollar bills.

The circus parade passed off without any untoward occurrence. Buffo’s lurching gait and uncoordinated gesticulations of arms and legs went unnoticed among the antics of the other clowns, who were so concerned to ‘cover’ for him that each excelled himself in outlandish capers, leaps and pratfalls. When Buffo tripped over a poodle, it was the work of a moment for Grik and Grok to seize either end of his disarticulated carcass and go into an improvised version of the ‘Clown’s Funeral’, wiping imaginary tears from their eyes with lavish gestures of their flowing sleeves. Buffo kept rearing and bucking away between his pallbearer’s shoulders as if he were having so much fun in his death throes that he simply couldn’t bear to stop, while his shrill, ear-splitting voice stuttered out imprecations that, so long as you did not understand them, were funnier than you could have believed possible: such thwarted fury, such incomprehensible rage! The clowns carried Buffo round the ring and off, behind a section of high-stepping and contemptuous horses, who could spot a Yahoo when they saw one, while Buffo cursed the world and all who dwelled therein, to the uncomprehending delight of all observers.

They dumped him down in the menagerie, to await the clowns’ last cue. He sent Little Ivan running for another pint of vodka and, when it was time for the Feast of Fools, the Clowns’ Christmas Dinner, the Lord of Misrule himself, possessed as he was by the spirits in the bottle, went out of his mind.

They bore the trestle table into the ring and, with their customary wealth of by-play, spread it with its white dustsheet and laid it with the rubber knives and forks and plates, prodding, stabbing and poking at each other the while sufficient to procure gales of mirth. They took their places round the table, tucking their napkins into their neckbands, and the audience took time out to catch its breath.

Buffo, in the wings, emptied the fresh bottle and tossed it aside. When he saw the glare of the arc lights, he covered his eyes with his hands and screamed. ‘Oh, don’t you see!’ he cried to Little Ivan. ‘The moon has turned to blood!’ But Little Ivan spoke no English and understood only Buffo’s scream. Into the ring he staggered, the child tagging anxiously at his heels.

His fresh make-up was already flaking and his bald piece wrinkling up until it threatened to dislodge his cap. He picked up the carving knife and flourished it most horribly; from the tip floated an ominous knot of red ribbons. Little Ivan had the job of getting the blue butcher’s apron on him and skipped round and round the teetering colossus, now on one side, now the other, in order to push him back on his unstable balance each time he threatened to lose it. The audience burst its lungs when it saw him, as if not to laugh would have provoked the most savage punishment. Buffo the Great! Nobody like Buffo the Great!

Little Ivan steered and tugged him to the head of the table, and Buffo collapsed on his collapsing chair. If his ensuing wrestling bout with the chair had all the defiance and bravado of Jacob’s with the angel, only the clowns suspected that, tonight, the harmless chair had indeed assumed in Buffo’s imagination the shape and form of some far from angelic adversary and, as he and the chair grappled with one another, the company around the table grew a little closer together, their tatterdemalion garments rustling as a wind of consternation blew through them, and then they, too, along with every child in the house, broke out in a great shout of pleasure and relief when Buffo finally, miraculously, got the chair down unprotesting on its four feet, smashed the seat flat with a crashing thwack of his palm, and, at long last, planted his bum thereon.

Backstage, Walser, the Human Chicken, his pants’ seat crammed with sausage links, crouched in a Japanese obeisance upon a silver platter amid a circle of papier-mâché roast potatoes. Grik tucked a sprig of parsley into his cockscomb.

‘Grab for the carvers,’ said Grik. ‘Grab the carvers off him, if you get the chance.’

‘Why’s that?’ demanded Walser uneasily.

‘In ’is cups, ’e
can
be homicidal.’

Then the domed silver dish-cover descended upon Walser, plunging him into a metal-smelling, resonant darkness, around which shushed and hissed, like the sound of waves inside a shell, the echoes of the old clown’s whisper: ‘Homicidal . . . homicidal . . .’

‘Here goes,’ said Grik to Grok. They picked up the roast between them and tottered with it into the ring.

Buffo peered at the great silver dish set down before him with mild surprise. For a moment, just one moment, the heaving, writhing horrors around him settled down in a kind of turbulent tranquillity. The roar of the crowd, the stench of greasepaint and naphtha, the weird company of acolytes who surrounded him, raising their faces towards him, comforted him and warned him and though, at any moment, a cock might crow, thrice, he was, for just this last space of a few heartbeats – ten; or, fifteen – again the loving father about to divide meat between his children. A last touch of grace passed over him; indeed, was he not the very Christ, presiding at the white board, at supper, with his disciples?

But, where was the bread? And, above all, where were they hiding the wine? He looked round for loaf and bottle but could see none. An immense suspicion wakened in his red-rimmed eyes. He recalled the carvers in his hands and lightly clashed the fork against the knife, agitating the bloody streamers in the air.

The elastic moment stretched, and stretched further, and stretched too far to sustain its comic tension. The laughter died away. A querulous ripple ran through the crowd. Although Walser, in the dish, could see and hear nothing, he had already acquired enough of the instinct of the trouper to know that, if Buffo were too far gone to unveil the entrée, the entrée must unveil itself.

Walser flexed his muscles with pleasure since his position was exceedingly cramped and uncomfortable and let out a rousing ‘Cock-a-doodle-do!’. The dish-cover went bounding and rebounding down the table, sending the rubber settings bouncing this way and that way. Up Walser rose out of his garnish like Venus from the foam, spraying parsley and roast potatoes around him, spewing sausages from his trouser vent, and, flapping his arms, he sang out again:

‘Cock-a-doodle-dooski!’

Buffo screamed most horribly and brought the carving knife smashing down.

‘Oh, my
gahd
!’ said the Colonel, at the back of the auditorium, clutching Sybil so tight she squealed, champing down so hard on his cigar he bit it in two. ‘My gahd!’ He saw his glory depart, his halo fly away.

But Walser, his reflexes exquisitely refined by fear, took a gigantic leap into the air the very moment when, reflected in the dreadful mirror of the eye, he saw the great clown’s reason snap.

Buffo brought down the carving knife upon only the debris in the silver dish; the bird had flown.

Howls of delight!

The halo fluttered back to hover over the Colonel’s head, again, although now it had an uncertain, impermanent look. Troubled, he spat out the destroyed cigar, fumbled for another and, prompted by a furious convulsion from Sybil, scuttled out to the foyer to summon a doctor.

No sooner was the Human Chicken on its feet again than it took to its heels and sprinted the length of the board. Buffo was detained, for a moment, as he tugged the carving knife out of the table – for such was the force of his blow the blade had pierced the dish to the wood beneath – and then, with a high, whinnying scream, he was after him.

All present agreed it was a fitting climax to the great clown’s career, that chase after the Human Chicken, round and round the great ring, round as the apple of an eye, of the Imperial Circus in the Imperial City of St Petersburg. How the little dogs enjoyed the fun, snapping and nipping the ankles of hunter and prey, running away with links of sausages, playing football with the roast potatoes, getting under everybody’s feet while the other clowns dashed hither and thither, at a loss as to what to do, concerned only to give the illusion of
intentional
Bedlam, for the show must go on. And, even if Buffo at last
had
contrived to plunge his carving knife into the viscera of the Human Chicken, nobody in that vast gathering of merry folk would ever have been permitted to believe it was
real
manslaughter; it would have seemed, instead, the cream of the jest.

And now Buffo, in his delirium, began to shake, to shake and shiver most horribly, to most horribly grimace and to convulse himself in such a way that his immense form seemed to be everywhere at once, dissolving into a dozen Buffos, armed with a dozen murderous knives all streaming rags of blood, and leap and tumble as he might, Walser could find no place in the ring where Buffo was not and gave up hope for himself.

Why didn’t Walser run out of the ring the way he’d been carried into it? Because the exit was blocked already by the iron paraphernalia of the Princess’s cage, and the cats, sniffing blood and madness on the air, were growling uneasily, pacing to and fro swishing their tails while the two girls stared from between the bars, distraught, until the Princess took matters into her own hands and stepped out of the cage, with the nozzle of the hosepipe in her hand.

The shock of water blasted Buffo back into one single form, blasted him off his feet, blasted him up into the air in the final somersault of his career, and then flattened him on his back. A few moments later, as the crowd held its aching sides and mopped its eyes, Samson the Strong Man hauled prone, soaked, semi-conscious, fearfully hallucinating Buffo off up the gangway that led to the foyer as little children gave him one last tittering poke for luck before he vanished as from the face of the earth, while the clowns ran round and round the tiers of seats, kissing babies, distributing bonbons and laughing, laughing, laughing to hide their broken hearts.

The frock-coated doctor waited in the champagne bar accompanied by two stern-faced Mongolian giants who held a strait-jacket invitingly open between them. As the Princess lifted the lid of her white piano in the ring while Mignon flounced her lacy skirts, Buffo, babbling obscenities, was loaded into a waiting cab, leaving the circus for the last time, as he had never done before, in the way that gentlemen did, by the front entrance.

Farewell, old man. And from the coffin of your madness there is no escape.

Walser, pale, shaking and, once again, drenched to the skin, ducked his own dance with the tigress and sought refuge in Fevvers’ dressing-room, only to find the place festering with discord. Lizzie bent over some missive home, leaving the
aerialiste
to don her costume unaided. Fevvers gave Walser brandy and a towel kindly enough but only ‘tut-tutted’ at the terrible story of Buffo’s Last Supper in the most perfunctory manner and it was apparent something quite other than the show was on her mind. Her red satin evening dress swung behind the door, ready, evidently, to take her off to secret delights after the performance was over. The French dwarf’s poster, somewhat dog-eared with travelling, flapped on the wall, as if to remind you she was capable of anything.

Looking febrile and somehow illicit with excitement, she sat in her dressing-gown in front of the mirror. There was a vast diamond bracelet on her right wrist and she fixed in her ears a pair of earrings each composed of a stone fit to make the Kohinoor blink.

‘Like ’em?’ she said, scintillating at Walser. ‘They’re a girl’s best friend.’

Lizzie spluttered derisively at that and might have spoken, but then such a roar of passionate but unidentifiable emotion came from the distant audience that they could hear it even in their little eyrie above the courtyard. Such a sound as the Roman audience must have made when a lion ate a Christian.

Then the crack of a shot.

As the band broke into furious music, came a frantic banging and rattling at the dressing-room door.

It was the Colonel, clutching Sybil like a drowning man, sucking as on a teat on the black stub of an extinguished cigar, tears standing in his veiny eyes. If he had shied away from Fevvers for a while, after the débâcle of their date, now he came to throw himself on her favour.

‘Fevvers, my dear, you’re on next! Daren’t wait for the interval. Unexpected turn of events. Sudden catastrophe –’

He broke down and blubbered like a baby. Fevvers rose up impassively, surveying the Colonel from the majestic balcony of her bust.

‘I say,’ she said. ‘Be a
man
and pull yourself together.’

From the courtyard below rose up the sound of a great weight being dragged across the cobbles, accompanied by a woman’s sobbing. Clustering at the window, they witnessed, in the dismal light of the moon, a dreary procession. First, Samson, called on for his strength a second time that night, hauling by a rope tied round her middle the body of Walser’s former dancing partner, the tigress, which left a bloody trail behind it, and, following on, the tigress’s chief mourners, with their shoulders carelessly bare to the freezing night in their white dresses, but both those dresses smeared with blood and Mignon’s hanging from her back in ripped shreds.

The Princess carried the rifle with which she had shot the tigress, a peerless bullet straight between the eyes, the moment after, just one moment after the jealous tigress, deprived of her escort, could bear the sight of Mignon dancing with her mate no longer. The Princess shot the tigress the moment after the tigress whirled from her pedestal down amongst the circling cats and got her claws in Mignon’s frills; the Princess shot the tigress just before she got her claws in Mignon’s flesh. All the same, it was Mignon who cried.

Fevvers shut the window with a clang. The longhairs from the Conservatoire had learned their lesson well; the show indeed went on but the relentless jollity of the circus orchestra did not drown the baying of the crowd.